It used to be a case that simply having a website for your business was enough to give you a competitive advantage. This is no longer the case as now the vast majority of Irish businesses have a website – so to gain competitive advantage, your site needs to be better than your competition. We see a lot of good websites and a lot of bad websites and while this can be subjective, below are the top 10 common mistakes we see on business websites.
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WordPress – the importance of staying current
WordPress is the most popular website content management system in the world and powers a reported 34% of all the worlds websites – that’s over 75 million sites! So it should come as no surprise that here at ClearSoft, we have a number of WordPress sites in that 75 million.
WordPress is robust, extendable, usable and has a vibrant community constantly working on enhancements and new features. Many of the top websites in the world such as TED, CNN, People Magazine, UPS amongst others use it as their chosen platform.
With great popularity comes great threats. Given the scale of its user base, it can be very attractive for hackers to probe for back doors into this system – and they succeed regularly. And when they succeed once, it’s very easy for them to propagate an attack to hit millions of WordPress installations around the world. The WordPress development community is in a constant ongoing battle to stay one step ahead of the bad guys.
Buzzword Bingo
One of the most important tasks in my job is to speak to clients in a language that they can understand. We techie nerds need to understand the lingo of how a website runs, we don’t need to overload our clients with too much unnecessary jargon. I thought I’d write a blog to explain some of the buzz words you may hear from web designers.
Hosting
For a website to be visible on the internet, it must be hosted on a web server. Think of hosting as the process of housing your website on the internet. We have accounts with some of the top hosting companies in Ireland and will look after the hosting for you.
Server
A server can mean 2 things in relation to the web
- A server is the computer on the internet that hosts your website (Windows, Linux etc.)
- A server is the software that runs on a computer that processes requests and responses to your website. Think of it as a container for your website.
Would you like fries with that? The dangers of online website builders
This post is mostly cantered about why I don’t like online website builders. Am I biased? Of course I am! Is a part of me jealous of these companies? Sure. Is the technology impressive? Absolutely. Am I a website snob? Maybe ….
That said, I genuinely don’t believe these solutions are good for most businesses for a number of reasons that I’ll outline here. But first we must go back in time to 2006.
I established ClearSoft in 2006 and had visions of developing a product that would provide an affordable set of tools for non-technical people to create a website from nothing. This system would be web based and while it would work for sports clubs, community organisations and personal sites – it was specifically aimed at small business. Sound familiar?
So what’s the deal with GDPR?
The General Data Protection Regulation is an EU regulation on data protection and privacy that comes into effect on May 25th of this year. It applies to personal data held on all citizens of the EU and any personal data transferred out of the EU.
In simple terms GDPR aims to give control to individuals over their personal data and how it is stored. This impacts on all businesses that capture user data and of course one of the main areas where businesses capture user data is on their website through contact forms, cookies, customer databases, newsletter subscription lists etc.
Some Of Our Clients
